And now for something completely different

I am still a regular reader of The New York Times and I am convinced that this is the best newspaper available nowadays. Or at least one of the best, but I haven't found the others yet. It has so many interesting articles, really well documented. It's one of the few papers that still affords to have journalists investigate for many months a single topic, to get it covered in depth, and that features excellent pieces by world-class experts.
[I even pay the monthly subscriber fee to the online journal - the NYT, which until last spring was fully and freely accessible online, including archives, has made a major change and is now giving free access to only a limited number of articles per month. Beyond that, readers have to get a 15 $ monthly subscription, which is quite significant in our free-internet era. It has moved to a completely different economic model and it will be interesting to see how this turns out financially.]

So sometimes I happen to read very interesting and illuminating articles in the paper, such as recently "don't blink ! the hazards of confidence" by Daniel Kahneman, who is a professor of psychology and a winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics.
M. Kahneman explains that professionals are often over-confident in making judgements, mostly based on impressions, and continue to be confident even in the view of statistical evidence that they are doing little better than random guesses. He show how this happen in particular with investors, both individual investors (who generally underperformed) and professional investors (who did not regurlaly and consistently performed). He talks about the illusion of skills ; he shares his experience as to how people discount the statistical findings because they do not fit with their own narrative and understanding ; he does not discount true expertise but gives some criteria for weighing it.

His conclusion - but you should really read the whole article :
"We often interact with professionals who exercise their judgment with evident confidence, sometimes priding themselves on the power of their intuition. In a world rife with illusions of validity and skill, can we trust them? How do we distinguish the justified confidence of experts from the sincere overconfidence of professionals who do not know they are out of their depth? We can believe an expert who admits uncertainty but cannot take expressions of high confidence at face value. As I first learned on the obstacle field, people come up with coherent stories and confident predictions even when they know little or nothing. Overconfidence arises because people are often blind to their own blindness.

True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes. You are probably an expert in guessing your spouse’s mood from one word on the telephone; chess players find a strong move in a single glance at a complex position; and true legends of instant diagnoses are common among physicians. To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals’ experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes. Anesthesiologists have a better chance to develop intuitions than radiologists do. Many of the professionals we encounter easily pass both tests, and their off-the-cuff judgments deserve to be taken seriously. In general, however, you should not take assertive and confident people at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, this advice is difficult to follow: overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion".